Category Archives: Parent

Train2Game News: Game Industry Jobs – 28.11.12

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DEVELOPER

Job Title Tools Programmer

Job Category Programming

Location Midlands, UK, Oxford

Job Description My client is a leading game developer with offices in 3 different locations. With over 30 million downloads of their games to date, they are one of the fastest growing social mobile publishers on iOS and Android.

Focussing on creating innovative ultra-high-quality titles, using their own proprietary technology and with their cutting-edge art and design teams, their standards are second to none – making their entire work original, never copied.

Due to their continued success they are now looking for a Software Engineer / C++ Tool Developer to help build their content creation pipeline.

The ideal candidate will have developed software that is used by artists in a production environment in the games industry.

Candidates without relevant experience who meet the other requirements are still encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities:

– Work with artists and engineers to design and implement software features and applications

– Work on our existing 3D rendering systems to produce new tools

– Contribute to software reviews and product documentation

Skills / experience required:

– Experience of Mel script

– Knowledge of 3d Maths

– Experience with real-time 3D graphics techniques (OpenGL or DirectX)

Also Desirable:

– Experience with common modelling / texturing / animation techniques

– A good understanding of concurrency

– A good understanding of UI design

– Application scripting experience in C#, Lua, MEL or Python

For more information or to apply for this role please contact Sam Keywood direct on:  01709 834777  or at: sam@aswift.com

DESIGN

Job Title Car Handling Designer

Job Category Game Design

Location Midlands, Midlands

Job Description: Are you someone who is fanatical about cars? Do you have a Mechanical, Engineering or Software background? This is a brilliant opportunity to take your passion and use it to kick-start a career in the Games Industry!

This role is for a leading UK studio that have already shown their high calibre with their first major release going straight to No. 1! They develop big budget titles aimed at a truly global audience. The studio is both young and dynamic and gives you the opportunity to work on AAA games!

The studio is looking for a Car Handling designer who will be responsible for using proprietary tools to create authentic, believable and fun vehicle handling for licensed cars. You will research, implement and tune each car, ensuring it handles in-game in the same way it does in the real world.

You must be very passionate about cars and car culture, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the auto industry. In addition, you must have a strong working knowledge of vehicle mechanics and car setup.

You must be flexible, highly motivated, meticulous and a fast learner.

You should have:

•Excellent communication skills

•Strong Computer Software skills

•Demonstrable game design skills

•An excellent knowledge of cars, tuning and car culture

•An excellent working knowledge of, and a real passion for, the racing genre

•A genuine passion for games

This is an opportunity to join a highly experienced team and help shape the core experience of a genre-leading game.

The studio is located in a very sought after area of the UK. They will offer a competitive salary and great benefits. If you or anyone you know is interested feel free to contact me and send your CV to richard.balding@amiqus.com .

ART

Job Title 3D Artist (Games)

Job Category Art / Animation

Location London

Job Description We are looking for a passionate multi-skilled artist to join our growing dedicated games team in our London studio.

The ustwo™ games team is looking to build on its success with Whale Trail and release new titles for iOS and Android with stand-out production values, heart and broad appeal.

The company prides itself on allowing staff the opportunity to grow by offering an environment in which staff can produce the best work of their careers. We are looking for candidates who can demonstrate their desire to shine and grow in an atmosphere of creativity and collaboration.

If you are a talented and passionate artist who wants to be part of an exciting team then join us and help make games for the world to love.

Job requirements

  • Excellent 3D modeling, texturing and animation skills
  • Strong 2D visualisation skills
  • Ability to work in a range of styles
  • Experience creating game assets.
  • Excellent communication skills with a friendly and positive demeanor
  • Highly motivated and driven to make stand-out games
  • Interest in variety of art styles and influences
  • Passion for gaming

You can apply by emailing work@ustwo.co.uk

QA

Job Title: QA Tester

Job Category: QA

Location: Oxford

Job Description:

NaturalMotion, is looking for a tester to work on its upcoming mobile platform titles. This is a full time, contract position with an expected minimum duration of 3 months.

Daily duties will include testing and reporting issues discovered, working to use and improve test cases and working with small, project-based teams to ensure efficient testing throughout a project’s life.

While extensive testing experience is ideal, it is not strictly necessary and a little testing experience combined with enthusiasm and additional transferable skills is welcome and there will be a chance to learn and train with the testing team.

Testing will cover such areas as the user interface, menu items, inspecting the 3D assets for errors, gameplay, progression, and all other non-gameplay areas in addition to the game itself. Diligence and the ability to commit to repetitive tasks will be required in these roles.

Requirements:

– Excellent verbal and written English skills as you will be required to communicate with staff from all disciplines (both technical and non-technical) and to write clear bug reports.

– Self-motivation and enthusiasm.

– Diligence in conducting sometimes-repetitive tests and bug isolation.

– Ability to quickly learn new software tools.

– Knowledge of current generation games and hardware.

– Knowledge and use of mobile platforms (such as iOS and Android)

– Previous experience of software testing (including mobile and/or social games)

Desirable additional Skills/Experience:

– Experience of software testing on several different titles.

– Familiarity with testing on the iOS and Android platforms.

– Experience in using bug-tracking and test management tools.

– Experience testing in an Agile environment.

– Understanding of and design of Test Cases.

-Working knowledge of a programming or scripting languages

You can apply HERE.

Train2Game News: SpecialEffect Charity Auction

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A new art exhibition is auctioning off game pictures for charity SpecialEffect. Everything on display at the London Game Festival exhibition is for sale.

Included in the initial batch are three signed pieces from Batman: Arkham City, two Fable 3 pieces signed by Peter Molyneux and the artists, a signed Metal Gear Solid ‘Raiden’ canvass, plus pieces from Tomb Raider, Dishonored, Moshi Monsters and Runescape.

The collection will be made available to bid on in four batches. The first batch is available now. The others will be put up for auction every Monday until 3rd December.

The auction is held online at www.londongamesart.com

Do remember to keep watching and sharing SpecialEffect’s video. They are well over half way to hitting the target of 25,000 views by christmas day. I know this can be done and it will really help spread the word of SpecialEffect!

Train2Game News: Gareth Brook talks to T2G Radio

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Train2Game student Gareth Brook talks to T2G radio about his time in the army and how it has affected him today.

You can listen to part one here: http://audioboo.fm/boos/1056755-train2game-student-gareth-talks-to-mark-part-1

Part two here: http://audioboo.fm/boos/1056750-train2game-student-gareth-talks-to-mark-part-2

or read the transcript below.

Hi I’m Gareth Brook and I’m on the games designer course and I live in Leeds, England.

What’s your story? What are the past experiences that have shaped your life and made you who you are now?

You could go back to my Army days, I joined the Army at the age of 16 after leaving school and that had a big role to play in who I am today. It turned me into the man I am, made me grow up very quickly. I spent five years working mostly over in Northern Ireland, that’s where my one and only posting was, for about three years. I worked as a telecommunications technician and working a lot in IT systems as well as that. After leaving it, it got me in to IT, not something I particularly wanted to spend the rest of my life in but it was paying the bills, it was OK money and I was good at it so for the time being I was still wondering what to do with my life and it’s only recently that I’ve actually come to a decision. It’s a decision that was easy to make and it’s one that I should of made years ago really.

 

You mentioned that you were in the Army, has that influenced your game designs at all?

I’m not to sure. The ones I am working on at the moment, I would probably say not too much. I’m not quite at the level where I’m putting out first person shooters and that kind of thing on a military scale. I think it will have some influence in the future because all though I have been a civilian for seven or eight years now I think, I don’t believe anyone that’s spent a fair amount of time in the forces will ever become 100% civilian. I am still a squaddy at heart and I think it is going to influence me in the future. Things like the discipline from the Army and things like that, it’s stuff that’s going to stick with me forever.

 

What made you decide to leave the Army in the end?

It was a family decision in the end, I decided to choose my family over my career in the Armed forces. It’s a single mans game is the army.

 

I know you’ve got a fiancé now and a couple of kids as well.

That’s right, yeah. I’ve got a step son and we have a daughter together that’s just turned one.

 

So how do you find your time to study and do all your games design and being a Father at the same time?

It was fine, it was OK, but in the last few months my daughter’s started crawling and she is getting in to everything and with my fiancé working, times have gone where I could crack on during the day whilst my daughter was just in a bouncer. Now she’s everywhere it’s pretty hard during the day to try and get anything done. I’m a bit of a night crawler though so I do quite a lot in the early hours of the morning.

 

After you left the Army then, what did you do after that did you say?

I worked as an IT contractor, short term contracts. I started off in a place in Cumbria, where I was working for a company called B.A.E which were developing the latest and last Hunter Killer class submarine at the time. Then it was back down to Leeds, where I was brought up, I worked all over Leeds, different contracts in Wakefield, York and then a lot of it was on the road visiting different clients, down the M64 corridor, that sort of thing. As far north as Middlesbrough, as far south as Leicester and Coventry.

 

So you’ve had quite the versatile life then?

I’d say so yeah! I’m turning thirty in April but most of the people that I know don’t seem to have had as many life experiences as I do. I feel a bit old before my time if you ask me!

 

Out of all the things you have done what do you consider the most dramatic or exciting thing you have done?

That’s a bit of a difficult question to answer considering everything I’ve done. I suppose the most exciting thing is beginning the path in the games industry. After twenty nine years on this planet it feels like a decision I should of come to a decade ago and it’s just such a perfect fit. Dramatic? Any number of things for the last year, my life is filled with drama. If you ask my best friend he’ll say “It’s just like watching a soap opera.”

 

What brought you to the idea of finally getting in to the gaming industry?

I think it was just on a whim really. I was bored in the current job that I was previously in. I wasn’t bored as such but I didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life, that much I know and I thought OK, what am I going to do? I would mill around with different ideas in my head thinking I could do this or I could do that but nothing really seemed to jump out at me and say right this is what I’m meant to be doing with the rest of my life. I looked around trying to find courses in Video Games industry and I came across Train2Game’s website and I thought, Oh this looks pretty good, so it went from there.

 

What is your big game plan for the future, what are you aspiring to be?

Well right now as I am still in the designer course, anything in a design capacity would be great to get me in the industry. Long term future I would say I’d be interest in the production sides of the games industry. That’s something I’m not involving myself in heavily at the moment but it’s something I’ve always got the corner of my eye on. Picking up knowledge where I can about the role.

 

After being in the Army, what do you think of games like Call Of Duty and Modern Warfare, games like that. How do you compare them?

It’s probably best comparing a game like Battlefield rather than Call Of Duty. Call Of Duty, I can’t really compare that, everyone really plays that for the multiplayer and it’s just not realistic at all. Battlefield, more so but I don’t think it’s ever going to be, or should be, as realistic as possible because it is quite different. A game still has to be a game and has to be fun. All though I was in an operational place, it wasn’t Afghanistan or Iraq and I’m sure people that I know will tell you that it’s not something they would like to sit down and live out for two hours a night in front of a computer.

 

Right, so thank you very much Gareth!

No problem!

Train2Game News: Fiona Stewart radio transcript

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Fiona Stewart spoke to BBC Radio Leeds recently. You can listen to the interview in the link below or read the following transcript.

http://audioboo.fm/boos/1049459-train2game-student-fee-stewart-on-bbc-radio-leeds-8-november

So what to do then if you are a talented budding artist but you hate the smell of paint? Well our next guest has just the answer you decide to start drawing art work for computer games and use a PC as your easel and brush. Fiona Stewart from Holmfirth has become so successful at this that the biggest company in the world has given her financial backing. Hi Fiona

Hello

What happened was it a sudden hatred of paint or had you always had it?

No, after I had the children it became more difficult obviously, with three kids running around the house and the paint drying and things like that, the smell and everything became more and more difficult as the kids were starting to grow up.

And it’s not a natural move then for someone who creates with a canvas say, to someone who designs games. How did that transition happen?

Well a friend of mine made 3D models and she asked if I could texture for her because that’s more sort of drawing and I started doing that then decided I actually wanted to make the 3D models as well and do the whole process.

How fascinating. What sort of things do you actually design now then, what do you work on?

Well I work on video games now, so we make apps, console games, games for 3DS and Android phones things like that.

So does it feel like art in the way it did perhaps pre-kids, when you were doing what most people listening to us would consider conventional art?

I actually think its more artistic. If you look at video games and things, the amount of art work thats in it is a good proportion of the actual game its self. I feel more that I’m contributing in an artistic way perhaps more than I did when I was doing it on canvas.

Of course, probably our best known Bradford artist, David Hockney he does so much of his work on the iPad now, doesn’t he?

Yes he does, yeah.

What about this backing from Microsoft then, how did that come about?

Well I met with Microsoft and showed them the game we have been making from the beginning of January. We did a Game Jam up in Scotland and won various awards and got BAFTA nominated for the New Challenge Award. So I showed him the game and he was very interested in it and it would make a very nice game on the Windows 8 mobile platform. He thought we would do very well, so he has been helping us

That’s rather nice and probably rather different from what most struggling artists experience in terms of funding supplies.

Yes, we have been very lucky really in so much that Microsoft have given us BitSpark programme, which is £30,000 worth of software that we can use and integrate throughout the whole of the team so that we are all using the same platform and various talks with other start ups which is very helpful as a start up.

Well good luck, it’s not the easiest of climates to be heading into any sort of start up business. Can I just ask you finally, do you miss the traditional art stuff or do you ever dabble occasionally?

It’s becoming more and more rare that I do because doing it digitally it’s there instantly, I don’t have to wait for any paints to dry. I am still being incredibly artistic but not having to wait around for things to dry.

Fascinating Fiona, really good to speak to you thanks for your time this afternoon. Fiona Stewart from Holmfirth on BBC Radio Leeds.

 

Fiona was also featured in develop magazine and you can read that in the link below.

Develop Magazine

Very well done Fiona! Good luck with everything.

Train2Game News: Student Diaries – 12.11.12

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Amanda Blatch diary – week 8

Another week, another diary.. I think I may actually be running out of things to talk about. Doesn’t mean the work has stopped, it just means I am still working on the UI and it would seem a little tiresome to just repeat myself about the same thing as last week so I will keep this brief for you guys reading this.

The game itself is getting cleaned up pretty well now and we’re so close to completion, trying to beat the clock and get the game submitted in time for the end of this month for release. Alongside that one of the in-studio artists is starting to work on the concepts for the new project so it’s something we can see it breathed into life in the next week or so, all quite exciting here at DR! We have also seen the departure of one of the T2G students who will be missed in the studio, we wish him the best of luck in the future with his career as an animator!

So apart from that, there isn’t much else to talk about soooo… till next week again.

 

Craig Moore Student Diary – Week 51

This week has been another incredibly busy one, adding polish and “fun” to the game is much more difficult than you would expect when it relies heavily on the balance of numbers as well as a lot of subjective reasoning. It does however feel like it is making some headway and the game inside what we have made is slowly rearing its pretty little head and hopefully it will blossom soon.

Tutorials are probably the bane of my life right now; they are so incredibly hard to get right. This really fine balance between hand holding and making the player feel like they aren’t on a linear path, you just kind of need to say “this is what you need to know to play the game, therefore I need to tell you X,Y,Z”. Balancing that and pacing it seems to be a fine art though…

It is Eze’s last week this week, he has done some awesome work for us while he has been here and it will be a shame to see him go. He has a lot of opportunities ahead of him though and I look forward to seeing what he gets up to in the future.

Time to get back to the grind!

Craig

 

Matty Wyett Simmonds – week 49

This week has been a bit of a bug fixing week for me, no real sprint, more just doing what I can to fix any issues, there is still lots to do though of course! There is always lots to do but never enough time, but now I’ve been given some freedom to work on the things that have been bugging me for a long time ^^.

During the weekend we had a small gathering at hour house to say good bye to Ezekiel who has just left. He’s been here for 6 months which is a long time and a lot of experience, so hopefully he jumps right into another decent job somewhere quickly.

Over the weekend I finally got some free time to do whatever! I played some planetSide 2, some halo 4 and even worked on my own project for a bit which is slowly coming along nicely. I was using GameMaker 8 to make an RTS game called Data Wars, however due to some annoying issues and limitations I jumped ship and have moved to Unity where I need to start from scratch. Nothing is salvageable because they are both very different programs (one being 2D and the other 3D for starters). I moved to unity because although it will be harder to work with, it will give me more freedom and potential features that could not be done in Gamemaker, which seems to be a terrible program for RTS games. 😛

Anyway, more to do at the studio now, till next week!

MattyWS

Train2Game: SpecialEffect Case – Julian

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Julian is a young man with advanced muscular dystrophy and needs ventilation to help him to breathe. Helen & Douglas House in Oxford got in touch with us to ask if we could help him to be able to play games as he’s now only able to move his eyes and one of his fingers; he spends nearly all of his time in his care home in bed.

The SpecialEffect Team visited Julian to assess ways in which we could help him to use the computer to enhance his quality of life and the most important things to him were to be able to play games and to control the television. As soon as we’d raised sufficient funds to buy a loan eye-gaze system under our StarGaze+ project (as all others are already out on loan), we visited Julian again to set up the system for him. Marta had spent time researching the right games for Julian’s abilities and he can now use his system to control the television, play games, watch his favourite videos and play music.
Please do keep watching the video below and help them reach their goal of 25,000 views

Train2Game News: Adorable TED talk

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This is an incredibly cute talk taken from TED. The video was brought to my attention by a member of the Train2Game forum.

It is a talk by a Dad and his young daughter about the game they made together at a weekend game jam.

They make some very excellent points together in a heart melting way.

You can enjoy the video below:

Train2Game News: SpecialEffect Case – Chloe & Ella

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This weeks SpecialEffect case is a very special one. One of the young girls in the video is the daughter of the founder of SpecialEffect. The two girls use Kinect to play together, you can see how much fun they are having.

SpecialEffect has almost reached their goal of 25,000 views so lets keep watching and sharing to help them out!

Train2Game News: SpecialEffect Case – Charlotte

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SpecialEffect is still quite small but is doing incredible things. Below is a one minute video of the amazing Charlotte Nott, a 4 year old little girl that battled meningitis and who we have been able to help play with her family and friends again with a specialist Nintendo wii.

Please continue to help SpecialEffect by watching and sharing the video below. We need to get to 25,000 views by Christmas day! It has now reached over 10,000 views, keep up the good work.

Train2Game News: Games help Rage Control

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A video game has been developed to help young people tackle their anger management issues.

Rage Control uses a device placed on a child’s finger to monitor heart rate – if it gets too high, they lose the ability to shoot at enemy spaceships. The player must control their emotions to do well in the game.

Researchers said the game led to significant decreases in anger in the children studied.

The study compared two groups of nine to 17 year olds. Both groups received standard anger management treatments but the second group also spent 15 minutes playing Rage Control at the end of their session.

The study showed that after five sessions, the children who had played the game were better at keeping their heart rate down and they showed lower scores on a recognised rating scale for severity of anger issues.

The lead author of the study, Peter Ducharme, said he hoped that children playing the game would be able to apply the same calming techniques to other areas of life.

Mr Ducharme said “Kids reported feeling better control of their emotions when encountering day-to-day frustrations on the unit

“While this was a pilot study, and we weren’t able to follow the kids after they were discharged, we think the game will help them control their emotions in other environments.”

The next step in the study is to develop toys for younger children that have the same principle. For example racing cars that stop if a child gets too excited or a cooperative building block game that becomes more wobbly if the child’s heart rate goes up.

This is another excellent example of just how the games industry can help all people of the world. With people creating games like Rage Control and charities such as SpecialEffect, the world can not question the good the games industry can do